If you decide to have a go and lift weights without minding the precautions, you may consider yourself defenseless in a world of lurking dangers. Simply put, if you don’t give a hoot about basic weightlifting safety, you’re as vulnerable as a turtle without a shell.

The management of a chronic and incurable disease like diabetes requires knowledge on the part of those with the disease and the ability to put that knowledge into practice. A well-educated health professional can help the person with diabetes acquire the knowledge and skills he needs in order to cope with his disease. However, this transfer of knowledge is often not possible in the setting of a quick and harried doctor’s consultation. Hence, the evolution of the diabetes educational clinic. Complementing clinical diabetes care, these educational clinics are manned by competent and dedicated diabetes educators.

Answer: Chromium is an element that is abundant on the earth’s crust and in seawater. It exists in many forms and is found in egg yolks, whole-grain products, high bran breakfast cereals, coffee, nuts, green beans, broccoli, meat, brewer’s yeast, some brands of wine and beer, and in multivitamin preparations. The recommended daily dietary allowance for chromium in humans aged seven years and above is 50 to 200 ucg/day.

Answer: Alternative therapies continue to be in the mainstream of diabetes therapy. You see patients bringing bottles of herb supplements apparently marketed as a treatment for diabetes and related illnesses like high blood pressure and high cholesterol. But one form of treatment that has gained wide acceptance both in the East where it originated and in the West where it is now widely practiced is acupuncture. And almost always in my practice do I come across a patient asking me about acupuncture and diabetes.

French investigators at the Universite Denis Diderot-Paris said that insulin resistance, a diabetes precursor, is a specific feature of chronic Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection, independent of the severity of the infection and other metabolic factors.

According to a study reported in the medical journal Diabetes Care, a type of light therapy, which involves infrared light called monochromatic infrared energy (MIRE), is no more effective or better than sham therapy for treating nerve damage or neuropathy in people with diabetes.

A week’s worth of exercise for sedentary older people who are at risk of developing diabetes showed significant improvement in the function of their insulin-making beta cells, said researchers from the University of Michigan.

Having a higher-than-normal heart rate while at rest increases a middle-aged person’s risk of developing diabetes in later life, or even dying from the disease, said researchers in a study.

Study investigators from the Northwestern University in Chicago noted that, “Heart rate is a simple-to-measure clinical tool that provides potentially useful information about an individual’s metabolic health.”

Women with type 1 diabetes who are taking less insulin than what is required to control the disease may inadvertently find that their lifespan is reduced by more than a decade, according to a recent study conducted by the Joslin Diabetes Research Center in Boston.